COLUMN ONE : China’s Invisible Weapon : Long-secret CIA report shows how Beijing manipulated U.S. foreign policy elite. Study reveals deft diplomacy in playing off American insecurity, ambition and sense of guilt to achieve goals.

For years, China relied on its importance in the Cold War as its main bargaining tool with the United States. Now it uses its economic might. But for more than two decades it has had another hidden, powerful weapon in dealing with the U.S.: its sophistication in courting those Americans who count the most.

A long-secret, two-volume history of U.S.-China negotiations, released by the CIA to The Times, details how Beijing repeatedly “manipulated” top U.S. officials, from the Nixon through Reagan years.

The report, written by the RAND Corp. for U.S. intelligence agencies, is laced with examples of how the Chinese handled the United States’ foreign policy elite, including Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Bush.

Starting with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in 1971, the Chinese used a variety of tactics--from serving opulent banquets to playing U.S. presidential politics--to advance their interests on issues such as Taiwan and Indochina.

“The most distinctive characteristic of Chinese negotiating behavior is an effort to develop and manipulate strong interpersonal relationships with foreign officials,” the report concluded.

The study contains the first transcripts of top-level conversations between U.S. and Chinese leaders ever made public. Among them are the historic visit of July, 1971--when Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, became the first U.S. official in more than two decades to visit the world’s most populous country--and Nixon’s own trip to China in 1972.

Until now, scholars say, virtually all public knowledge of these events has come from the sometimes self-serving accounts of Nixon, Kissinger and other U.S. officials.

The 1985 study, which The Times obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit after five years of requests, paints a less heroic and less flattering portrait of the Americans than the accounts based on their memoirs.

In essence, the study shows how skillfully China conducted its diplomacy with the United States--a lesson demonstrated once again last month by Beijing’s success in persuading the Clinton Administration to back away from its attempts to impose human rights conditions on trade privileges.

From the earliest days of the Nixon-Kissinger initiatives, the study says, the Chinese tried to exploit individual insecurities, play off Presidents against their domestic rivals and orchestrate meetings to maximize Americans’ sense of “gratitude, awe and helplessness.”

On the landmark 1972 Nixon visit, for example, Kissinger negotiated the “Shanghai communique”--in which the United States acknowledged that Taiwan was part of China--”late at night after a banquet of Peking duck and powerful mao tai liquor,” the study says. In the afterglow of the sumptuous spread, Kissinger is quoted as telling his hosts, “After a dinner of Peking duck, I’ll sign anything.”

Chinese officials tried, usually successfully, to carry out negotiations on their own turf and by their own rules. U.S. officials invariably had the disadvantage of having to lay out their own positions first.

“We have two sayings,” Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua told Kissinger in New York in October, 1976. “One is that when we are the host, we should let the guests begin. And the other is that when we are guests, we should defer to the host.” Kissinger joked about the imbalance but volunteered, “I will be glad to start.”

Likewise, the report says that the Chinese were masters at keeping their visitors on edge and off balance.

On a trip to Beijing in May, 1978, Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, engaged in what RAND describes as “almost comical” exchanges with Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders as he repeatedly tried over two days to inform them that Carter wanted to normalize relations with China.

The Chinese acted as though they did not hear Brzezinski or believe him.

“We are looking forward to the day when Carter makes up his mind,” Deng said. “Let us now shift the subject.”

Brzezinski finally burst out in frustration, “I have told you before, President Carter has made up his mind.”

The RAND report said the incident shows “how the Chinese can hold off (a visiting official) in order to entice him to accommodate to their position.”

In his memoirs, Brzezinski recounted this conversation but minimized its importance, concluding that Deng had shown flexibility on Taiwan issues.

RAND completed the study in 1985. The author, Richard H. Solomon, a RAND specialist on China, had been an aide to Kissinger on the National Security Council and later served as a senior State Department official in the Ronald Reagan and Bush administrations.

In commissioning the study, the U.S. intelligence agencies sought insight into China’s strategies in negotiations with the United States.

The Chinese considered it crucial to establish strong personal bonds.

“They attempt to identify a sympathetic counterpart official in a foreign government and work to cultivate a personal relationship, a sense of ‘friendship’ and obligation,” the study says. “They manipulate feelings of goodwill, obligation, guilt or dependence to achieve their negotiating objectives.”

The report shows clearly that during the Nixon Administration’s opening to China, Chou and other leaders repeatedly played upon Nixon’s fear that the historic first steps might be made by Democratic leaders.

As soon as Kissinger arrived in Beijing from Pakistan on his secret trip July 9, 1971, a year and a half before Nixon’s first term was to expire, the prime minister quietly told him: “The time that is left for President Nixon is quite limited.”

“Which time period is the prime minister talking about: 5 1/2 years or 1 1/2 years?” Kissinger asked, a reference to whether he expected Nixon to be elected to a second term. Chou replied that when Nixon came to China, “he will answer that question.”

The next day, the prime minister let Kissinger know he had “a great pile of letters (from other U.S. politicians) on my desk, asking for invitations.”

Nixon was so worried that his political rivals would beat him to China that Kissinger specifically told Chou that the President “wants no political visitors before his trip,” the study says. And two weeks later, in secret talks in Paris, Kissinger also added a new request that the Chinese “keep their distance from American ‘left’ groups.”

China complied with these requests--in large part, the study says, because Chou and Chairman Mao believed “that Nixon’s shift in China policy would in fact contribute to the President’s reelection and thus they, by dealing with Nixon alone, would put the President in their debt.”

Kissinger does not discuss these conversations in his memoirs, although he mentions that on the eve of his 1971 meeting with Chou, Nixon had asked him to seek from China “a severe limit on political visitors” before any presidential trip to Beijing.

The quotes used in the study also provide voluminous new evidence of the earthy, sometimes crude nature of Mao, the founding leader of the People’s Republic of China.

In late 1973, Mao wondered aloud to Kissinger why Americans were always “breaking wind” about the Watergate scandal.

Two years later, Mao, brought up among the peasants of Hunan province, taunted Bush, a Yale graduate who was then head of the U.S. liaison office in Beijing: “You don’t know my temperament. I like people to curse me. . . . If you don’t curse me, I won’t see you.”

At other times, the transcripts illustrate Mao’s philosophical side and his self-proclaimed role as the embodiment of China.

“The Chinese are very alien-excluding,” Mao told visiting Americans in early 1973. “For instance, in your country, you can let in so many nationalities, yet in China, how many foreigners do you see? . . . You have about 600,000 Chinese in the United States. We probably don’t even have 60 Americans here.”

The study also provides a wealth of fascinating new details about the Kissinger and Nixon trips.

For example, it discloses that in the days before Nixon’s visit, U.S. officials were secretly trying to arrange what would have been an even more stunning coup: a meeting in Beijing between the U.S. President and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s representative to talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War.

According to the study, the White House had heard rumors Le would visit Beijing just before Nixon’s trip.

On Feb. 6, 1972, two weeks before Nixon landed, the United States sent a secret message to China, through Paris, offering to meet with Le to discuss Indochina “with generosity and justice.”

China refused, answering that it supported North Vietnam and would not meddle in the talks. The secret offer underscores how much Nixon and Kissinger had hoped that their overtures to China would lead directly to a peace settlement.

When Kissinger made his secret trip to China, the history shows, Chou tried unsuccessfully to persuade him that they should tape-record their talks.

“I think they wanted to be able to tell the Vietnamese or the Koreans, ‘Here’s a tape of what we said,’ ” Solomon, the author of the RAND study, explained. “He (Chou) was trying to find a way to protect China’s credibility with their close allies.”

China constantly tried to pit U.S. leaders against one another or to make use of frictions among the Americans, Solomon’s study indicates.

During the Gerald Ford Administration, Chinese leaders played Kissinger against Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger.

In late 1975, they invited former President Nixon to China to help bring pressure on Ford for normalization.

During the Carter era, they exploited rivalries between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance. When Reagan took office, they favored Secretary of State Alexander Haig over Richard Allen, the President’s national security adviser.

The study says China twitted Kissinger for years with Deng’s 1974 invitation that Schlesinger visit China.

“Don’t be jealous,” Huang Zhen, head of China’s liaison office in Washington, told Kissinger on Aug. 18, 1976, as Schlesinger was about to make his trip. “You have been to China nine times, I believe. You even said yourself you wanted to go to Inner Mongolia.”

“But I didn’t get there,” Kissinger answered. “I wanted to see the musk ox of Mongolia.”

The RAND report makes it plain that the Chinese divided U.S. officials into friends and enemies.

“In at least one instance, (China) actively attempted to block the appointment of an individual they considered to be hostile to them,” the study says.

That was Ray Cline, a former CIA station chief in Taiwan and a strong supporter of its interests, who was helping Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.

When Bush, then Reagan’s running mate, visited Beijing in August, 1980, Deng asked tough, leading questions about whether Cline’s pro-Taiwanese views reflected Reagan-Bush policy, according to the report. And after Reagan’s election, the Chinese, fearing that Cline would be appointed assistant secretary of state for East Asia, published attacks on his views.

Cline did not get the job. In general, the study concludes, the Chinese did not try to cultivate skeptical or hostile Americans.

“The Chinese seem to feel comfortable only in dealing with those who share a basic inclination to establish positive guanxi (relationships) at the human level,” it says.

Chinese leaders skillfully courted U.S. leaders whom they could depict as “old friends” of China--particularly Kissinger and Bush.

“The official or negotiator is put in the position of having to ‘deliver’ for the Chinese to sustain his relationship with them, or face a loss of respect, prestige and political influence” in Chinese eyes, concludes the study.

“Such was the game the Chinese played with Henry Kissinger in 1974-75 when they wanted him to complete the normalization process and, with George Bush in 1980 and 1982, when they wanted assurances from the Reagan Administration that it would not ‘turn back the clock’ on U.S.-China policy.”

By late 1975, when it became clear that Kissinger could not bring about normalization, China’s dealings with him “bordered at times on the contemptuous, as he was in their view a ‘friend’ who had failed to fulfill a commitment,” the report says.

Kissinger’s two volumes of memoirs stop with Nixon’s resignation and do not cover his years in the Ford Administration.

The frictions of the Ford period seemed to have had some lasting effect. According to the study, Deng made some obliquely nasty remarks in 1981 to Secretary of State Haig about Kissinger, asserting: “I am very familiar with Dr. Kissinger. And we have great admiration for Mr. Nixon.”

Despite China’s occasional scorn, the history shows that Kissinger went to great lengths to preserve the close relationship he had forged with Beijing.

On the afternoon of Aug. 9, 1974, within hours after Nixon resigned as President, Kissinger assured Huang Zhen, China’s de facto ambassador to the United States, that all informal agreements made by Nixon and the Chinese were reconfirmed. Kissinger then brought Huang in for a meeting with new President Ford, who handed the Chinese envoy a letter to Mao.

Ford had only been in office for a few hours. In the letter, presumably drafted by Kissinger’s staff, he promised Mao that U.S. policy would remain unchanged, that Kissinger would stay on as secretary of state and that Ford would give top priority to “accelerating” normalization with China.

In addition to analyzing Chinese negotiating behavior, the intelligence study was designed to serve as a secret history of the first 16 years of U.S.-China negotiations, from 1969 through 1984.

That was necessary because the classified records of top-level talks with China by the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations were spread throughout various U.S. agencies and presidential libraries. The Carter and Reagan administrations had found that Chinese officials sometimes exaggerated what they had been promised by earlier administrations.

RAND was working for the National Intelligence Council, the U.S. government’s umbrella group that oversees the analytic work of the CIA and other agencies in the U.S. intelligence community.

The Times first sought access to the report in a 1989 Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA. After four years of review and appeals, the CIA rejected The Times request last summer, releasing only part of the chronology that accompanied the study but none of the conversations or analysis in the study itself.

Three months ago, The Times filed a lawsuit against the CIA in U.S. District Court here under the Freedom of Information Act.

After reviewing the case, the CIA in late May declassified most of the study, including many of the conversations and the overall analysis, and turned them over to The Times.

A few parts of the study are still being withheld. U.S. officials deleted some information on arms sales to Taiwan on grounds that they remain “highly sensitive” in U.S.-China relations. And they withheld many conversations involving Deng, who, they observed, is “still politically active.”

Over the years in which the CIA and State Department had refused to make the intelligence report public, they cited the importance of maintaining secrecy and confidentiality in foreign policy. But some U.S. officials had suggested other motivations.

Former U.S. Ambassador to China James R. Lilley said last year, “There was a lot of buttering up of the Chinese that wouldn’t look too good today.”

HENRY A. KISSINGER: “After a dinner of Peking duck, I’ll agree to anything.” Feb. 24, 1972

MAO TSE-TUNG: “The Chinese are very alien-excluding. . . . You have about 600,000 Chinese in the United States. We probably don’t even have 60 Americans here.” 1973

DENG XIAOPING: “I am very familiar with Dr. Kissinger. And we have great admiration for Mr. Nixon.”

June 16, 1981, to Secretary of State Alexander Haig